Re: test-update-copyright requires perl

[Jim Meyering]

Eric Blake wrote:

> I just noticed a problem.  update-copyright is a perl script only intended for
> maintainer use, which is fine, since only maintainers are required to have 
> perl
> installed (after all, we already know that maintainers have perl by virtue of
> the fact that they are running autoconf).  But, as explicitly permitted by the
> GNU standards, end users need not have good enough perl.  In other words,
> blindly including test-update-copyright as part of 'make check' in any package
> that bootstrapped via 'gnulib-tool --with-tests' can lead to spurious failures
> for some end users because the test is assuming more than the end user is
> required to have.
>
> One option is to just relax test-update-copyright.sh to gracefully skip the
> test if perl is not found or can't successfully perform copyright updates.
> Another option is to figure out a way to make gnulib tool distinguish between
> tests of end-user code (most tests) vs. tests of maintainer-only tools (test-
> update-copyright, test-vc-list-files, ...) and set things up so that 
> maintainer
> tool tests are only run by 'make distcheck' rather than 'make check'.
> Actually, even 'make distcheck' might be wrong, since that is supposed to work
> without autotools; and 'make maintainer-check' as part of maint.mk may be a
> better place.  Any other ideas, or an approach for a patch along any of these
> lines?
>
> For the record, I discovered this because 'perl -ei' fails on cygwin 1.5 [but
> works in cygwin 1.7] because of older cygwin's inability to delete in-use 
> files:

That should be easy to detect.

Do you mean that perl -pi fails on cygwin 1.5?
For example, would this fail?

  echo a > f && perl -pi -e s/a/b/ f